


Compartmentalization

by Dubiousculturalartifact (222Ravens)



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Background Relationships, Character Study, F/F, Identity, autistic Ava Sharpe, because I'm autistic and i said so, being a clone hecks you up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-16 01:27:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18084776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/222Ravens/pseuds/Dubiousculturalartifact
Summary: Ava tries really hard to compartmentalize.





	Compartmentalization

Ava tries really hard to compartmentalize.

 

It’s supposed to be something she does effortlessly, to slot everything into its correct category, analyze, synthesize, and strategize.

 

It’s the reason she’s come as far as she has, the reason she is as good as her job, as she is.

 

But sometimes that falls apart.

 

It’s hard to compartmentalize love, it turns out. Especially when you don’t see it coming, when it seems like the exact _opposite_ of the right person, until you wind up fitting together so well, that you can’t imagine anything else.

 

It’s hard to compartmentalize friendship, either.

Gary, despite... So many things. All the Legends, like Nate and how much she's come to rely on him. Or that that the time Ray crashed on her couch while visiting and they watched a cheesy musical together that Ava had reluctantly liked, and in the morning he'd made pancakes and cleaned her entire kitchen.

 

Hell, even the time Mick offered her a beer out of his personal stash, which she’s given to understand is a ‘pretty big deal’, or the time Zari had given her a thumbs up and said ‘Welcome to the Denizens of The Shitty Future Club’, like it was acceptance.

 

Nora, who is technically a prisoner but a damn fine drinking buddy, and Mona, who is kind of like a cocker spaniel who just ate six sugary cupcakes, but has a strangely compelling kind of charm.

 

It’s hard to compartmentalize loss.

 

The loss of Rip, no matter everything that went down. As much as it would be easier to hate him, or forget him, she owes him too much, for it not to hurt.

 

The loss of all the Agents who died under her command, good people, every one of them.

 

The loss of... Herself.

 

The person she knew she was.

 

Every echo of memory that she thought she had.

 

Every certainty in her path, her purpose, her routine and habits and procedures and worldview, because it turns out that none of it really belonged to her, did it?

 

Sometimes that scares her the most, of all of it.

 

The nights when she stays up too late, when Sara doesn't come home because she messed up the temporal synchronicity, and she’s sitting in a kitchen alone, with nothing but herself and _who even is that_ , anymore?

 

The nights when Sara is there, and she starts a fight or rages or cries, and the vulnerability of it is so foreign, except that Sara understands.

 

When Sara holds her and whispers quiet things about how you can choose who you are, because she knows.

 

Sara Lance knows what it means to lose yourself, to be unmade and remake yourself, and she couldn’t love her any mode, just for that.

 

The hardest thing to compartmentalize, it turns out, _is_ herself.

 

Because the thing about compartmentalization is that it’s an active process, and no matter how engrained it feels, it take _effort_.

 

The thing about it is, it doesn’t work so well when every time she tries it, the mechanics of the process remind her.

 

They make her think of filing things neatly away in computer files, in programming, make her think of mechanisms and efficiency, and what makes her good at her job, until she’s bent and gasping with the reminder of what she is.

 

She doesn’t know if she is that way because it’s who she is, or if she was _made to_ be this way, or if it’s both, or if the distinction even matters.

 

Does it matter? If everyone is the sum total of every experience they have had, everyone they have met, everyone that shaped them… Does it matter if not all of that was real, as long as the important parts are?

 

The thing about compartmentalization is that sometimes Ava just gets tired of it.

 

She wants to _feel_ , wants to prove that she’s even goddamn capable of it.

 

Wants to scream and bleed and rage at a world that never wanted her to be anything but a perfect, formless cog in a machine.

 

Wants to laugh and cry and love so fucking fiercely, to prove she’s capable of it.

 

Wants to tear the world apart for ever making her doubt her own humanity, and wants to never have

 

Needs to know if who she is, is the person that she wants to be.

 

Every day is a choice of becoming.

 

Of sorting through all of those compartments in her head, and finding out which ones she wants to keep

 

But...

 

She is who she is, no matter what that means.

 

Sometimes that means she _wants_ to compartmentalize, needs the safety of that.

 

Needs the shape of the rules that she loves and hates now with equal measure.

 

Compartmentalization is sometimes about familiarity, about choosing when to open a box, when to shut up...

 

Or when to throw away the boxes, and dream something new.

 

Ava isn’t very good at that, but she’s trying.


End file.
